USC Verdugo Hills Hospital Turns 50

For five decades, USC-VHH has stayed true to its community focus while continuing to evolve in the 21st century.

In 2022, USC Verdugo Hills Hospital celebrated 50 years of providing essential, community-focused health care.

When the hospital opened in 1972, it filled a need for residents in the La Cañada Flintridge and Crescenta Valley communities who had been isolated from the nearest full-service hospital in Glendale prior to the construction of the 2 and 210 freeways.

Local leaders and physicians lobbied hard throughout the late 1960s for a neighborhood hospital to address these needs. A proposal surfaced to repurpose and relocate the small, existing Behrens Memorial Hospital to a spot of land along the Verdugo Mountains donated by J. Morgan Greene and his family.

The site would become the home of Verdugo Hills Hospital.

“It was really created to serve the community, by the community, and it was funded by the community,” says Armand Dorian, MD, CEO of USC-VHH. “That community tie, as well as passionate physicians and nurses, really kept it going for many years.”

By the early 2000s, as the health care industry continued to evolve, VHH experienced the financial challenges of being an independent hospital not affiliated with a larger health system.

A merger between Keck Medicine of USC and Verdugo Hills Hospital in 2013 brought “huge investments in restoring and revitalizing the important health care resources that this community had come to rely on,” Dr. Dorian says.

Those investments at USC-VHH have produced a neonatal intensive care unit, an interventional radiology and cardiac catheterization lab, an award-winning emergency department, a nationally ranked urology department and a robust women’s health practice.

USC-VHH is also designated as a center of excellence for knee and hip replacement and physical medicine.

One thing that has not changed is the personal touch and the comfort of receiving care in a smaller, more intimate hospital.

“We still want to provide the personalized care to the patients that we serve in this community, and I think we have kept that,” says Happy Khanna, MD, chief of staff at USC-VHH.

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